Video: Tony Rayns Introduces Director Park Kiyong

Post date: 07 November 2018

News category: Blog

Veteran independent filmmaker Park Kiyong will be arriving in London on Sunday 11th November to present and answer questions at a screening of his film Camel(s) before sitting down for a special 'In Conversation' event with Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns. Park will return just once more during the festival for a screening and Q&A of his latest work,Old Love on Monday 12th.

Ahead of his visit to the festival we sat down with Tony Rayns, programmer of this year's Indie Firepower strand, who shared a few words about director Park and his career. You can take a look at what Tony had to say in the video above.

For further insight into Park and why he was selected as the focus for this year's Indie Firepower, here's an extract from Tony's introduction to the strand from the LKFF 2018 brochure:

These are strange days for independent
filmmakers in Korea. Last year’s change in
government from a right-wing administration
obsessed with silencing and punishing its
critics to a left-liberal administration which is
trying to right past wrongs has left some indie
directors uncertain how best to move forward.
This is clearly not the time for agit-prop or
righteous indignation, but there are still plenty
of social issues to be addressed – so the left
is still searching for new positions and new
ways to engage audiences. Meanwhile the
graduates from Korea’s many film courses are
negotiating other questions. The mainstream
film industry is more powerful than ever and
is overwhelmingly focused on entertainment
and escapism. Should newly trained directors
bend to the industry’s will or try to find ways to
make more personal work within the system?
Such decisions can be life-changing, so they
really do matter.

This year we’re screening the three fiction
features made across twenty years by Park
Kiyong, who faced exactly the same questions
in the late 1990s. Park graduated from the
Korean Academy of Film Arts in the late 1980s
(it was then Korea’s only film school) and did
numerous odd jobs in the industry before
making the non-mainstream Motel Cactusfor
the company Uno in 1997. The film attracted
a lot of attention at home and abroad,
but everything he’s made since has been
done independently, including a suite of
documentaries, an experimental short and
two more fiction features, Camel(s)in 2002
and Old Lovein 2017. The documentary
subjects have ranged from the effects of a
major earthquake in New Zealand to the lives
of Korean-Chinese in both Korea and China,
but his fictions are quite homogenous: they all deal with short-term sexual relationships,
albeit in rather different ways. Park has
combined his filmmaking with extended
periods of teaching: he was in charge of his
own alma mater KAFA for five years, and is
currently training directors-to-be at Dankook
University in Seoul. In other words, he’s
face-to-face with a new generation which
has to make the same choice he made himself
nearly twenty years ago, between adapting
to the film industry’s requirements and taking
an independent route.

Park Kiyong will be our guest in London this
year, and we’re looking forward to hearing
his insights into the joys and sorrows of
independence in today’s Korean film culture.